Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

Christopher R. Browning’s *Ordinary Men* is a seminal work of social history that examines the actions of Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of German Order Police deployed to occupied Poland in 1942. Through meticulous archival research, Browning reconstructs the battalion’s participation in the mass shootings of Jews and their role in rounding up victims for deportation to extermination camps. The book challenges the notion that perpetrators of the Holocaust were exclusively fanatical ideologues, arguing instead that the majority of these men were average, middle-aged, working-class citizens who committed atrocities due to a combination of peer pressure, deference to authority, and the gradual erosion of moral norms.

Description adapted from Open Library ↗.